In football circles, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are often referred to as “America’s Team.” This isn’t really an accurate term though. A more accurate description of the team would be “The Ass of the NFL.” What in the Sam Hill could this possibly have to do with left-wing politics?
The NFL is divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC. The NFC consists (sort of) of the NFL teams that have been around since 1920. The AFC consists (sort of) of the teams from the old AFL. The AFL was formed in 1959 as a competitor to the NFL, and by 1970 the two leagues were fully merged. The AFL-NFL merger is what produced the Super Bowl.
Currently, the AFC and NFC are further organized into four divisions each: East, West, North, and South. Each division has four teams, for a total of 32 NFL teams. The divisions have been reorganized and renamed over the years; the current alignment has been in effect since 2002.
In 1960, the Dallas Cowboys were formed as an NFL expansion team. At that time, the NFL consisted of 13 teams divided into Eastern and Western conferences with no further divisions. Cowboys’ founding owner Clint Murchison Jr. hired Tex Schramm to be the team’s first general manager.
Schramm, who died in 2003, was the Cowboys general manager for nearly 30 years. Schramm was a marketing genius. He formed the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. He got the Cowboys their yearly Thanksgiving gig.
But the most important thing Schramm did was lobby hard, and successfully, to get the Cowboys into the NFL’s Eastern conference. Originally, the NFL wanted to put the team in the West. But Schramm was driven to get maximum exposure for his team, and he understood that meant getting them into the East.
That wouldn’t have meant anything had the Cowboys not been winners. No one cares about teams that perennially lose. But Schramm didn’t just know marketing, he knew football too. He hired Tom Landry to be the first Cowboys coach. Twenty-nine years later, when Landry was unceremoniously fired by current owner Jerry Jones, he had five Super Bowl appearances and two victories to his credit.
But Jones has been glomming off of Schramm’s achievements. Jones does want to win — something that cannot be said about many sports owners, who don’t care how their teams perform as long as they’re making money. But that’s about where the credit Jones deserves stops.
Jones hired his college buddy Jimmy Johnson to succeed Landry as head coach. Johnson had won a national championship in college football as the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes in 1987. Johnson went on to win two Super Bowls with the Cowboys, and because of these three overall championships, some people have gotten the mistaken impression that Johnson was a great coach.
Tom Landry was a great coach. Johnson was a great motivator and a great evaluator of talent, but not a great coach. At the collegiate level, success is determined not by X’s and O’s, but by recruiting — if you can recruit the talent, you’ll be successful. If you can coach on top of that it’s a bonus, but it’s not required.
In 1989, the Minnesota Vikings made what was arguably the stupidest trade in the history of professional sports — a trade so monumental it has an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to it.
In 2003, Jones hired legendary NFL head coach Bill Parcells to run the team and stop the bleeding brought on by his own mid-90s mismanagement. Parcells improved the team greatly, but Jones just couldn’t keep his sticky fingers out of the cookie dough, bringing in the talented but obnoxious team-killing wide receiver Terrell Owens against Parcells’ will. Parcells left Dallas to work his magic in the front office of the now-much-improved Miami Dolphins, while current Dallas head coach Wade Phillips presides over a soft team disintegrating into irrelevancy.
Despite all this, the genius wrought by Tex Schramm lives on, and that’s why the Cowboys are football’s most consistently polarizing team. Some fans want to them to win, some want them to lose, but everyone has an opinion. That makes Dallas the NFL’s moneymaker – which makes them the Ass of the NFL. But what’s the relevance of this for left wingers?
Capitalist societies pretend they’re meritocracies. Rich people promote the mythology that we all get what we deserve. Now, plenty of people know this is a load of horse dung, but the mythology is still shoved down our throats from cradle to grave. Why? Well, if it’s true — if we all really do live in a meritocracy as the privileged would have us believe — then none of us have any call to begrudge the rich what they have. They’re rich because they deserve it, and if we don’t like it, then it’s our problem to deal with, and we obviously just need to stop whining and work harder.
Of course, capitalist societies aren’t meritocracies. Most people in them who are rich made their money the old-fashioned way: They inherited it. But this simple truth has to be constantly denied, and to the greatest extent possible people must be diverted from thinking about it and instead fed fairy tales about hard work leading to “success.”
Currently, the Tennessee Titans are the NFL’s only undefeated team at 9-0. Everyone acknowledges them to be the best team in the AFC and one of the two best teams in the league (along with the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants, who currently sit at 8-1). But when you watch ESPN’s SportsCenter, or listen to national sports talk radio, the story is always the Cowboys. No matter what media outlet it is, they virtually always lead with talk about Dallas.
In a true meritocracy, being 9-0 would count for more than being sexy. The fact that the Titans are a small-market team wouldn’t prevent them from being mentioned first or second on SportsCenter. Tennessee has earned that. Even if they lose the remainder of their games and finish the regular season at 9-7 (an impossibility), as of this writing they’re alone among the ranks of the NFL’s undefeated. Only being the defending champs, as the Giants are, should be able to compete with that.
But we don’t live in a meritocracy. We live in a market-based economy where profits and market share are king. The Dallas Cowboys name alone generates more money in our capitalist society than can the hard work and success of the small-market Titans.
Prior to this season, ESPN ranked the 32 NFL teams based on who has the “best fans.”
But the real rankings (as far as the NFL, its advertisers, and national media outlets are concerned) are those from September by Forbes.com: the NFL team valuations. According to Forbes, the five most valuable NFL teams — which are also the five most valuable franchises in all of U.S. sport — are the Cowboys, Washington Redskins, New England Patriots, Giants, and the New York Jets.
You’ll know we’re living in a good society, or least a better one, when teams get more love for being perfect than they do for simply being worth $1.6 billion.